We Are Twins Born in the Sign of Gemini

For a while, I described Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World as the six-minute answer to the question of why I love cinema. In the past nine months or so, though, it's been displaced by the above clip from Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort. The film ran on one of our HD channels for a while, and I can't for the life of me figure out why they don't market hi-def televisions by showing excerpts of Rochefort rather than bits of those interminable Caribbean pirates movies. I suppose this will tell you exactly why I'll never pull down a paycheck marketing products for Best Buy, but I'm serious. The film's bright and vivid colors and the elaborate contrasts in the production design come alive in hi-def, so the cropping of the above video is only part of its infirmity.

There's a game I play with my daughters. I'll quietly whistle the first few notes of the song in the clip and then stop. I never have to wait more than a few seconds before one of the older girls starts humming or whistling the rest of the song, often without knowing it. The song lasts two minutes and forty-two seconds, more or less. In those one hundred and sixty-two seconds, there are fifteen different shots, with an average length of over ten seconds per shot, or a glacial pace by Baz Luhrmann standards. The shots alternate between the full-length shots of the sisters, medium shots of them and the close-ups for particular lines to be sung. I can't get enough of it.

Dans l'Obscurite

Last month my friend Doug sent me a link to the above video, the contribution from the Dardenne brothers to an anthology of shorts, TO EACH HIS OWN CINEMA, devoted to celebrating the Cannes Film Festival and the idea of film as a collectively-experienced human endeavor. The latter concern is particularly timely. It's not at all hard to find people who will tell you that they love to watch movies and that they watch them constantly but that they loathe theaters for the same reasons that people dislike public toilets. The masses are noisy and inconsiderate and things are just cleaner and better at home at my theater of one or two. As we become more and more attached to lives with fewer and fewer human contacts, we feel at ease in the self-controlled environment of home theaters and pause-able DVD. Home video windows continue to get smaller and there are fewer compelling reasons to go to the movies, the thinking goes. But what if one of the distinguishing characteristics of film as an artform-- one of the things that makes film film-- is its ability to wrap itself around a group of people simultaneously and draw their subjectivities in together? Of course, you don't need to spend much time telling the people who go to festivals that there is still profound, irreplaceable value in seeing films with groups of strangers. DANS L'OBSCURITE approaches the question from even higher ground and posits that there is an actual moral benefit to the theater.

Doug's got a great formal analysis of the short at his website. The short features two actors with connections to past Dardenne films. Jeremie Segard plays another dark blonde-haired young man who needs to be rescued from wayward living, while Emilie Dequenne plays the woman he tries to rob. The casting is a thank-you note to Cannes, as Segard played a pivotal role in L'ENFANT, which won the Palme d'Or in 2005, and Dequenne conquered the known universe as ROSETTA, which took the top prize in 1999. And after having their names associated so often with Robert Bresson (while essentially remaking MOUCHETTE and PICKPOCKET), it feels like a reunion of sorts, or like cutting out the middleman, to have the short take place against the backdrop and under the weighty influence of AU HASARD BALTHAZAR. Apart from those connections, what's most fascinating to me is how this three-minute film manages to perfectly distill the Dardennes' aesthetic. It contains every element that makes the features so powerful-- the unknown or unspoken motivations of the characters, the conflict, the moment of encounter, and the quick cut away after the moment of encounter, as the Dardennes don't presume to tell us how the work of redemption is brought to completion, if it ever is. The touch is light and the emotions are genuine. For the longtime fan, it's a chorus or reprise of the themes they've been tracing throughout. For the uninitiated, it's a perfect three-minute introduction to their form.

There are two ways I can think of to read the young woman's actions; either she knows full well what the boy was in the midst of doing and is moved by the film to immediately forgive him and seek to redeem his actions, or she is "merely" so moved by Bresson's film that she is in need of some human touch and she grasps the first hand that comes to her, oblivious to his intent. It's difficult to overstate just how audacious the first reading is, and I prefer it thoroughly to the other. This sort of forgiveness and indifference to one's own self-preservation is so implausible that it's generally the sort of thing seen only in advertisements. But the Dardennes are way too earnest to pull something like that. Instead we're faced with the challenge that a movie--that the right movie--has the power to confront us with enough beauty and compassion that we would be inspired to forgive and embrace a person seeking to rob us.

LOCAL NEWS

I. Oh, so that's how they're going to handle it.

Today's Post-Gazette carried this discussion with the director of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Rawson Marshall Thurber. The interview and Thurber's expressed affection for Pittsburgh provides a well-timed and welcome diversion from the recent local media feeding frenzy concerning one of his cast members. He also discusses acquiring the story and writing the screenplay, while mentioning that his screenplay eliminates Arthur Lecomte. Huh. Well, that changes things a bit.

Sure, it takes out the extra romantic angle, and rounds the story back into the familiar triangle (Thurber refers to the novel as a "[love] rhombus." Just last week I'd seen it referred to as a love trapezoid.) Apart from the additional relationship entanglement, though, the elimination of Lecomte seems to me to remove a really strong and influential (and hilarious) voice from the chorus of influences pushing in on Art. I haven't lost any faith in the project-- if Michael Chabon can be convinced the idea works, who cares what a meatball like me thinks?-- but I've got to think that subtracting Arthur Lecomte from the screenplay means that there's no guarantee the film couldn't, by some means, slide toward the mean of studio-indie coming-of-age films that arrive and depart quietly each season.

II. Yeah, Malkin.

If you're a huge Pittsburgh Penguin fan (as I am) and you went to five or so home games a year from the mid-nineties to the present (as I did), then chances are that you got to see at least two Mario Lemieux comeback games and at least two Mario farewell games. I know I did. I think I even got tickets a couple of times to coincide with comeback/farewell games. I went to the last home game in the '97 playoff loss to the Flyers where Mario said goodbye by scoring a last-minute breakaway on Islander-GM-in-the-making Garth Snow. These days, sadly, I seem to coincide my Penguin ticket-buying with the occasions where I'm most likely to be given a machine-painted resin figurine with an oversized skull. But sometimes I still get lucky. Like tomorrow, when I'll be able to see Evgeni Malkin's debut game. Yay, me. Of the four games they've played thus far, I've caught parts of three of them, and I like what I've seen. They're alternating great efforts with ungreat efforts, though, but are due for a positive showing tomorrow.

THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU

Just for a bit of context, here's the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's one and one-half star video review of Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu:

It attempts to comment on the failings of the Romanian medical system and a post-socialist society where people talk "at" instead of "to" each other. It's the first of a planned six-part series on Bucharest, and we're sure the story of the unnecessary death of a lonely, smelly old alcoholic could have helped to shed light on the social issue. But in any language, there's something to be said for effective storytelling, and this isn't it.

If you've seen the film, then I hope that dismissal sounds as baseless to you as it does to me. If you haven't seen the film, then I hope you either don't read that paragraph or that it doesn't color your perception of the film. I'm certain that not one word of it is insightful.

I think that Lazarescu is a really well-written film. That seems to me like a strange thing to say first, given that the characters in the film aren't terribly talkative and the narrative is comprised of just a few extended scenes taking place initially at the title character's apartment and then at the three hospitals where treatment for him is sought, with several lengthy ambulance rides connecting the four locations. And yet it is exceedingly well-written, and I have to think that the film's unique power is built foremost on the strength of its script.

Lazarescu-- the lonely, smelly old alcoholic-- is a retired engineer who lives in a shabby apartment in a Bucharest high-rise. He's a widower with a daughter living in Canada and a sister within a day's travel. He has more than one cat living with him, and he frequently takes furtive drinks of some potent-looking homebrew. When he is taken ill with inexplicable pain one day, he has no one to turn to but the neighbors, who know him well enough if not intimately. The neighbors manage to get an ambulance to come quicker than it normally would, and Lazarescu is carried off from one hospital to the next.

Turning to the capsule quoted above, is there some sort of intellectual gag reflex hardwired into critics whereby any film or book taking place in a former Eastern Bloc country is automatically transformed into some meditation on the failings of the socialist state? I wouldn't think of denying that such films and books will necessarily bear the imprint of life under such goverments, but to presume that a film about a man who gets sick in Romania can't simply be about a man who gets sick in Romania seems to me to deny the character an essential humanity that we wouldn't be so quick to impose upon our own films or characters. I'll readily agree that this film doesn't do anything to "shed light on the social issue," but would add that the filmmaker couldn't really care less about that in the context of Lazarescu's journey, and the film is the better for it.

And if it wasn't enough that the film is expected to expose the sordid underbelly of socialized medicine, it's also being showcased as a conversation-starter on the subject of the failings of American health care. My friend Doug pointed out to me that the Region 1 DVD release of Lazarescu contains an extra feature entitled, ominously, "A Perspective on the U.S. Healthcare System." Oh, that will make this a must-rent title for people browsing in Blockbuster.

Why is it that a movie about a man going to the hospital is burdened with a lot of baggage that a movie about a man going to see his lawyer or a movie about a man spending time in his garden wouldn't be so burdened? I suppose it's because a significant portion of our perceptions of social progress depend on the idea that medical science, in theory and practice, is exact and trustworthy. We trust doctors, their training, their elaborate machines and their terribly expensive medicines to find what is wrong with us and to fix it, and the idea that there is still some whim or uncertainty or variation to the act of healing goes against our comfort and our willingness to devote such a large portion of gross domestic product to medicine.

Apart from the health care perfectability delusion, there is another large entry barrier that American audiences must overcome to appreciate Lazarescu. It has a point of view that is as different as can be from the typical hospital drama. All of the hospital shows that run perpetually on American television over the past dozen years are doctor-centered. The stories are told from the perspective of the medical staff, and we see them go about their days as patients dutifully enter and exit the screen. The doctors and nurses are the ongoing characters, and their personal and professional conflicts are the central drama of the show. The patients in ER or Scrubs are merely dramatic foils or props who provide moments of levity or induce some insight upon the doctor. The patient's role in the drama ends a moment before the episode does, when they are no longer needed to act as the object of attention of the highly-skilled but personally-tortured medical professionals. Once they have led the doctor to furrow his or her brow and consider something in a new light, they have served their purpose.

So when Lazarescu spends a collective hour in three hospitals with the doctors and nurses acting upon Lazarescu but remaining largely in the background in relation to the unconscious man on the gurney, there's a moment of dramatic disorientation. Hey, the doctors are supposed to swoop in and fix his problems with a torrent of jargon and surgical genius! What's worse, Puiu makes Lazarescu's experience (and ours as viewer) look a lot more like what we are accustomed to encountering at a hospital. We sit and wait, or stand and wait. We look at the others in line ahead of us and gauge their apparent maladies in comparison to what we perceive our own to be. We become bored and frustrated and wish to return to the life lived outside that place.

Assuming that all of those obstructions can be overcome, Lazarescu is an invitation to empathize with a man in the hours of his apparent death. Lazarescu doesn't say much after the first few minutes of the film. He feels ill, speaks to the ambulance dispatcher and his neighbor about his illness, calls his sister to tell her he is sick, speaks to the EMT who accompanies him throughout the film about his pain and then loses consciousness for most of the remainder of the film, with only a few moments where he is lucid or responsive after the halfway mark. For most of the film he is a passive human centerpiece carted from hospital to hospital or sitting in one hallway or anteroom or another. He is acted upon rather than acting himself, and spoken to rather than speaking.

Empathizing with Lazarescu is apparently a difficult thing to do, judging by the reactions to Lazarescu. He smells of alcohol, which gives rise to the one constant throughout the film: people ask Lazarescu if he is drunk, or wonder aloud (whether he's awake or not) whether his illness is the result of alcohol. When one's unconscious and smelling of alcohol, the latter must have caused the former, right? And so, doctors and nurses and capsule writers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and viewers like you and I assume that we're being compelled to deal with or watch this sick old man because he has drunken himself into a stupor. At some point in his unconsciousness, he loses control of his bowels, and by fouling himself draws even less sympathetic attention from the hospital personnel. It's an interesting challenge; in the face of the scowls and insults, can we continue to regard Lazarescu as a human being with dignity in spite of his incapacitation, his smelling of alcohol and being covered in excrement? If so, then there is something close to a cathartic release when, at the film's end, a nurse preparing him for surgery shaves his head and then tenderly calls him handsome. It's a beautiful moment, all the more so because Lazarescu has been so much denigrated.

Of course, it would not be fair to say that Lazarescu receives only poor treatment. The EMT who picks him up and stays with him throughout the film is uncommonly kind. Lazarescu spends an inordinate amount of time waiting to be treated, but at one point he is jumped to the head of a CAT scan line because he's held out as someone's uncle. The outright refusal of the medical staff at one hospital to treat him is galling, though it leads to an absurd discussion of consent that's very well-done. The staff at the third hospital, where he is finally treated, is as solicitous and professional as any of us could hope to have.

By his first name, Dante Remus Lazarescu points to The Divine Comedy and its own three-stop journey. By his last name, Lazarescu points to those two New Testament characters, the brother of Martha and Mary who died and was raised by Jesus and the poor man who was despised in his lifetime but sat at Abraham's side in the hereafter. It's those New Testament allusions that really fascinate me: can we, as viewers, see this unspeaking sick man with the same eyes that his Creator does?

SYRIANA

There's this scene in SYRIANA around the two-thirds mark. Matt Damon's character, a wunderkind energy firm analyst, is riding an elevator with a prince who is heir to an unnamed Arab oil emirate. Damon's character has achieved this unfettered access to the king-to-be through both his plucky resolve and his son's timely electrocution in the prince's pool. I can't remember whether the elevator was going up or down, but the hotel rooms cost $20,000 per night, so wherever they were going was an important place. Suddenly the elevator stops and George Clooney's character gets on. He's a little rumpled and heavily bearded in his CIA operative disguise, but he's still plainly the most charismatic man making movies in Hollywood. Clooney's guy says nothing to Damon's guy, but exchanges a few nondescript phrases with the prince. At that moment, I know. I know exactly what's going to happen next. After another moment or two of the elevator descending or ascending the fifty-story hotel, it will stop again. Then Don Cheadle will get on. He will be wearing an emerald green sequined shirt and will be speaking Mandarin. More seemingly insignificant banter will be exchanged, and by the time the elevator reaches the top or bottom, the prince will have been talked into signing over his oil holdings in exchange for nonexistent soybean fields in Illinois and the heroes will be on their way to a helipad. The CON will be ON.

It's strange. I went to see SYRIANA in the middle of making my way a couple of times through the television version of Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. There's no real reason to discuss the two in the same paragraph, but one contrast that occurred to me is too stark not to mention. Bergman's film is a five-hour measurement of the distance between two people and an exercise in creating a complex portrait of two characters and the relationship they couldn't sustain or abandon. In SYRIANA, the only sliver that could pass for character development or detail is the part in which the ambitious lawyer is openly disdainful of his sloppy drunk father in a couple of scenes in the middle of the film, but by the end of the film he has scaled it back to mild resentment.

Perhaps SYRIANA collapses under the weight of its own heft when it decides to separate the various players and assign them various gradations of moral culpability. I suppose that's an arguably necessary device from a conventional storytelling perspective to allow the audience one or two points of entry, but it sets in motion a fairly rote resolution of all those sprawling, interconnected storylines.

For one particular character example, take George Clooney's CIA operative. At the film's beginning, he's a morally ambiguous operator selling missiles to uncertain end-users to further national interests, broadly speaking. I believe, if I understood the labrythine plot correctly, that he was set to assassinate the aforementioned prince. However, he is then provided with a moment of moral clarity which steers him away from the anti-hero path and back onto the straight and narrow role of our moral voice and conscience. His fate is sealed when he meets Christopher Plummer's oil baron character at a diner to confront him. If anything constitutes a beatification in American cinema, it is any moment in which any male lead sticks his finger in any Christopher Plummer character's face and delivers the "Don't fuck with my family" speech. From that instant, he's resolutely the hero, all the more because we're there to watch him fail.

Note, though, that two of the plot points that illustrate Clooney's character's alienation and the ideological inferiority of his opponents are rehashes. Specifically, he discovers that he's being frozen out of the Agency when we see, in real-time, his computer deny him access to information he had just been able to see. Later, while Clooney is on the ground attempting to rescue the prince, we see the high-tech assassination played out from one satellite remove away, in a control room where bureaucrats order missile strikes which show up on computer monitors. I saw two scenes nearly identical to those in a Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movie some years ago. I think it's a safe bet that Tom Clancy and Stephen Gaghan wouldn't write the same position paper on fossil fuels and our national dependence on oil from the Gulf region, but they're using the same narrative language about their character and their government, and that's telling in a way that's hardly flattering to Gaghan's film.

Sure, SYRIANA has the same narrative hallmarks that may have become mainstreamed after Gaghan's own script for TRAFFIC, and the film tries hard to ape the unabashed circa-Watergate political paranoia of films like THE CONVERSATION, THE PARALLAX VIEW and DAY OF THE CONDOR. The problem, though, is that those elements, at least insofar as they are elements of plot and style, have been themselves neutered and mainstreamed into irrelevance. As a result, any outrage or even thoughtful reflection brought about by the film lasts, whether by design or not, only as long as it takes the viewer to get up and walk from the theater out into the parking lot, unlock the car and put the key into the ignition. The film's forgotten by the time the engine is started, because you've got to get home somehow.